This posting is not about Miriam, my (I should say "our" but my wife will doubtless disown the burbling of this site) beloved daughter. Her name is great.
Rather, it occurs to me that entitling a blog "Down with the Enlightenment" may seem rather daft. It is impossible to campaign against something which is done, the fruits of which are celebrated worldwide and which had so many positive aspects that it is almost universally popular - except perhaps with ultra fundamentalists deep in caves in Pakistan or enraptured in churches across rural America. Moreover, I am a Mason and much that is good about the craft can be traced back to principles which animated enlightenment thinkers. Finally, to fight against the Enlightenment may be as facile as to launch a "war on terror" - in that the endeavour is doomed to failure - just as you cannot bomb ideas or cage concepts it is impossible for me to win this debate.
Anyway, over the next few months I will endeavour to fail gracefully - indeed too cogent and successful an exposition would mark me down as a product of the very thing I revile. It will be my purpose perhaps to suggest that the pre-Enlightenment was less superstitious and cruel than is often imagined and that the post-enlightenment world we inhabit is more so than we suppose. Over time, I will also argue that the fruits are often over-rated and that, even in areas of science, such as particle acceleration, perhaps we ought not to aspire so "rationally" for further knowledge until we have gained greater wisdom. Anyway, my rant about CERN, or the increasingly disconnected and shallow age of ours will wait for another day - I have nappies to change.
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5 comments:
Looking forward to seeing where you go with this. Nice start. Louise
I for one have always been particularly concerned that our dabbling in the outer realms of particle physics might somehow accidentally create a black hole which, although small at first, might ultimately engulf the planet, possibly within a matter of milliseconds, thus rendering the enlightment and its virtue (or otherwise) quite irrelevant. I look forward to hearing your views on this topic.
Well "Buzzy" my cynical friend, I guess it would render about everything we all care about irrelevant. BTW there was a chap in Edinburgh a few hundred years ago, called Hugo Arnot who came to pretty much the same (facetious) conclusion old pal.
Isn't it quite an English thing to be anti-Enlightenment (or should that really be a lower case to signify modern "enlightened" people too)? One of the things I love about being English is our need to prick pomposity, often in an intelligent and witty way though. It's why we do satire so much better than anyone in the past 1800 or so years.
It is not anti-intellectual to be anti-enlightenment, just anti-big heads.
The French pay far too much attention to their intellectuals, that's why they need to have revolutions, whereas we just muddle on somehow. Your self-professed burblings are a tremendously English thing, treasure them.
Exactly - "academy this, academy that" etc., making for far too precious and fragile a society.
Perhaps their culture would be stronger if they had elevated the aristocrats and executed the thinkers - rather than the other way 'round! I mean, all that talk about an Age of Reason - and all the while tumbrils rolling - very undignified. The only chap I can think of who emerged from the Revolution with credit was Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (being, as far as possible, oblivious to it).
Still they kept a decent cuisine... so perhaps we ought to think fondly of our cousins across the narrow water.
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